Indigenous Media and Social Change

aka Culture Jam Anthropology 420 / Sociology 420

Mondays 4:10 to 7:55 Fall 2008

Instructor: Peter Biella Office: SCI 388 – ring doorbell Office hours: Tue 1:30 to 3:30 and by appointment Office phone: 415-405-0536 Email: biella@sfsu.edu Course website: online.sfsu.edu/~biella/420.html Required and Recommended Purchases

A course pack is available from Photo Day to be sold in class on Monday, September 8th or picked up from 3418 Geary at Stanyon. Call first to have a copy printed for you 415-387-4779.

In addition, you will need to purchase a 50 to 100 gig hard drive (with at least one Firewire 400 connection) for your work on Final Cut Pro assignments. Avoid Lacie’s Porsche drives. You can find relatively low-priced drives at www.macmall.com, www.newegg.com and www.amazon.com, as well as Best Buy, etc. You will need the drive right away, since your grade will depend on the work you begin to do right away. I strongly recommend that you investigate and perhaps subscribe to the excellent online, screen-based training film series that explain FCP features at www.lynda.com - access to FCP and dozens of other media application training videos are available for $25 a month fee. I also though less heartily recommend a Final Cut Pro book, but since you will only use a fraction of it, you might want to look for used and cheap. We will be working with FCP Version 6, but in most ways it is identical to Version 5. Amazon currently has 18 Final Cut Pro HD for Dummies [Version 5 – “HD”] at less than $20 each.

Course Objectives “The philosophers have heretofore merely interpreted the world.

The point, however, is to change it.” Karl Marx

This course explores how visual media shape the world around us. From signs to ads to tags to flyers, contemporary life is filled with information in non-textual visual form. In addition to being used in benign educational enterprises, images have been used extensively in political propaganda commercial advertising promoting many questionable causes. Using social scientific methods and theory, we will examine how persuasive images operate and how they might be subverted. The course will move beyond critique to praxis by training in the production of videos meant to disrupt dominant discourses – the idols of the mind and the marketplace. The exercises focus primarily on reediting pre-existing

footage and sound effects, but will encourage a variety of visual/digital alterations of same and also invite the introduction of original voice-over sound tracks and the insertion of new text and photographs.

Course Requirements / Grading Lab hours – This four-unit course requires that you spend a minimum of three hours of lab time outside of class each week. This will start up at approximately week 3. Once the semester starts up, the lab will be open for many hours every week. Reaction papers – Each week for the first nine weeks, you will be asked to turn in a reaction to the current week's readings. These papers are meant to keep you up on the readings (class discussion goes better that way) and to help me know what topics should be better clarified in class. The assignments are not meant to be polished arguments. You are required to fulfill 8 of the 9 reaction paper assignments. The assignments are graded on a pass/fail basis. Together, they will count toward 30% of your final grade. Your grade on this component will be calculated as the number of assignments passed (up to 9) divided by 9. Credit / No Credit FCP assignments – You will be given three relatively speedy C/NC Final Cut assignments during the semester. These assignments are meant to provide you with the opportunity to you learn basic FCP editing techniques, and they will also allow you to explore the creative/aesthetic use of culture-jam ideas from the assigned readings and class discussions. The three videos count for 20% of your final grade. Your grade on this component will be calculated as the number of assignments you pass divided by three. Along with the three graded FCP assignments, these must be turned at the end of the semester as playable QuickTime movies on a CD-ROM. They must therefore be saved on your external hard drive each week as they are produced. Learning to save your work reliably in FCP is half the battle of the learning curve. If they are not received on a CD at the end of the semester, they will not be counted. Graded FCP assignments – You will also have three formally graded assignments using FCP. The first assignment will require you to incorporate non-synchronous sound and reorder images. The second will require the same plus the incorporation of stills and text. The third is described in the following paragraph. Each of these graded assignments will count towards 10% of your final grade – a total of 30%. The graded assignments are meant to assess how well you use the FCP techniques you've learned in the service of cultural criticism/disruption/subversion.

Final project and paper – The last of the three graded FCP projects will use any digital video found objects of your choosing – along with (optional) poetry, stills, animation or kitchen sinks. The final video will be accompanied by an eight to ten page paper which includes discussion of a dissemination plan but is concentrated on providing a systematic theoretical explanation and assessment of the video intervention which incorporates pertinent readings from the class. The final paper constitutes 20% of your grade. THE SIX VIDEO ASSIGNMENTS ON CD AND THE FINAL PAPER ARE DUE AT 4 O’CLOCK MONDAY, DECEMBER 22, IN PETER BIELLA’S BOX AT THE ANTHROPOLOGY OFFICE - SCIENCE 377. KEEP COPIES OF EVERYTHING!

A note on readings

Studies of visual media (and the critique of cultural media) are conducted in many different disciplines ranging from the humanities to the creative arts to the social sciences. The emerging fields of cultural and visual studies draw on arguments and research from many sources. Nevertheless, this course will sustain a distinct social science flavor. The readings come mainly from the social scientists, and the course’s main approach to examining meaning will be empirical and grounded in social theory. While it may sometimes be more enjoyable to dally with slippery images than struggle with dry text, the purpose of the course is to help you understand text-based theoretical principles with sufficient expertise that that you may incorporate them into your own creative productions.

Macintosh computers and video editing

This course requires you to become competent with Macintosh based digital editing. The editing software is Final Cut Pro – commonly used in the real world of independent film. You will be dissecting films in order to learn how they are put together. Many of you will be introduced for the first time to technology and software that is unfamiliar – the learning curve will be steep at first. Yet many others in the course have considerable fluency in FCP. For them, the most challenging part of the course will be integration into film of the theoretical ideas developed in class. In all events, the course should be exciting and fun, and the Cinema and Anthropology Departments will provide lab hours and tutors to support you.

Related courses San Francisco State has long offered a rich variety of courses that concern visual media. We urge you to think of this course as one of a number of others you might take to educate yourself on questions of media literacy and activism. The Cinema and BECA departments both offer many courses to non-majors that expand knowledge of the mechanics and function of visual media. Anthropology and Film (Anth/Cine 327) has a related purpose, with an applied focus, as does the year-long, 12 unit Visual Anthropology sequence.

Course outline Date Lecture Readings, viewings, and listenings FCP lesson

9/8 Introduction to the course

Jimi Hendrix plays Francis Scott Key, The Star Spangled Banner George M. Cohan, Over There Bob Dylan and various artists, All Along the Watchtower Isaiah 21 The Fall of Babylon Proclaimed

Introduction to Final Cut

9/15 Poetry, sexuality and dissent

Alan Ginsberg, Wichita Vortex Sutra Ross Haenfleur, Rethinking Cultural Resistance

Final Cut Pro tools

9/22 Capitalism and commodity fetishism

Karl Marx, The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof Antonio Gramsci, from Prison Notebooks Thomas Frank, Why Johnny Can’t Dissent

Adding sound effects

9/29 Propaganda and counter-propaganda

I

Bertolt Brecht, Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties (1947) Pratkanis and Aronson, The Psychology of Everyday Persuasion George Lakoff, Framing 101: How to Take Back Public Discourse

Recording and adding in original sound

10/6 II

Francis Bacon, from The Idols of the Mind (1620) Peter Hart, from The O’Reilly Factor

Reordering

ima ges . >>>>>>>>>> >

10/13 III

Jeremy Bentham, from The Book of Political Fallacies (1824) Eric Boehlert, from Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush

Graded assignment one

10/20 Religious idiom of dissent

I

Christopher Hill, Levellers and True Levellers James Scott, from Weapons of the Weak

Adding stills

10/27 II

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail Cornell West, Prophetic Christians as Organic Intellectuals

Adding text

11/3 III

Christopher Hitchins, Introduction to The Portable Atheist Jason Grote, The God that People Who Do Not Believe in God Believe In: Taking a Bust with Reverend Billy

Graded assignment two

11/10 Copyright

Georg Lukacs, Legality and Illegality Dan O’Neill, Mickey Mouse and the Mouse Liberation Front Bob Levin, from The Pirates and the Mouse 2 Live Crew, Pretty Woman Roy Orbison, Pretty Woman

Storyboard creation

11/17 Class meets Tuesday the 18th, 9 am at the San Francisco Hilton Towers

11/24 No class

Thanksgiving holiday

Break

12/1 Just a joke

I

Micah Ian Wright, from You Back the Attack

J.B. Troudeau, from Doonesbury

12/8 II

Laurence Mintz, Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation Don Asmusen, from Bad Reporter

12/15 Screenings

Rough cut review

12/22 Final projects Final projects and papers due at 4:00, Monday, December 22

Appendix 1: Sound effects available on the course CDROM Appendix 2: Peter Biella, Afterword to Words from the Heart